Thomas Meaney in The New Yorker:
Benjamin and Lācis’s “Naples” gives its readers a glimpse of a unified world of cross-relationships, in which discontinuous elements are somehow all implicated in one another and intermingled. In their telling, Naples, with its “rich barbarism,” blissfully flouted the bourgeois norms of northern Europe without knowing it. Streets were treated as living rooms and living rooms were treated as streets; festivals invaded every working day; the division between night and day was never neatly observed. To Benjamin and Lācis’s delight, Neapolitans had not received the news about the evacuation of the sacred from the modern world. In one of the article’s scenes, a Catholic priest accused of indecent offenses is described being led down a street while a crowd shouts insults at him. Suddenly, when a wedding procession passes by, the priest gives the sign of a blessing, and his pursuers fall to their knees.
More here.
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